Dr. Connie McKoy
Associate Professor of Music
The Music of Black Americans by Eileen Southern
This was the first book I remember reading that was a comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of musical styles and genres among African Americans from pre-slavery periods in West Africa, through slavery to the middle of the Twentieth Century in the United States. Because Eileen Southern (1920 - 2002), was an African American musicologist and because hers was a seminal document of African American music in the diaspora, I have turned to her work repeatedly as a reference, both in my K-12 public school and university teaching.